Mickey Macabre Mouse
Junction Point won’t let up the macabre take on MM. The concept art is saturated with Kingdom Hearts and Shaun Tan. It’s very dark stuff that appeals to the genuine older fan. Just like how in the original Little Mermaid, she loses her voice because Ursula the Witch-octopus cuts out her tongue. Or in sleeping beauty, she woke up while she was in labour after the Prince impregnated her. Or in reality, the Big Bad Wolf actually accomplishes his Jack the Ripper act.
In an archived Edge interview from E3 2006 - before Disney got interrogated with interviews - Spector said: “I want to do a cartoon game really bad - well, really good. People don’t realise that I did my Masters thesis on Warner Brothers cartoons, you know - I used to teach animation classes, I’ve been a Disney stockholder since I was 19. I’m a cartoon freak, I’ve met a bunch of the old WB directors, and did Toon, the cartoon [pen-and-paper] RPG… And I’ve been trying to get somebody to let me do a cartoon game for the entire time I’ve been in the videogame business.”
During that interview, Spector even alluded to a project that sounds an awful lot like Epic Mickey. “I did some concept work on a license with a media company that was very cartoony, and boy, we did some great work. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, maybe since Deus Ex. The work was phenomenal, and I’ll never be able to show it or talk about it with anybody. Confidential. But hopefully the project will happen. We were gonna let people live in a cartoon world, and it was going to be wacky.”
Researching into all this gaming secrecy and hype comes to dead-ends, like small reels of exclusive concept images, then nowhere. Conceptual, not taken flight yet. Push for the banned ideas and soon witness the greatest unveilling of Walt Disney’s darkest materials. Well in an RPG game format. I’m so sad I can’t wait.
